The proliferation of social media is changing the way people produce and consume content, such as news for example. Concurrently, as barriers to content production fall and users are given the ability to express their opinions, editors, publishers and content consumers are typically finding it harder to gather and follow current events and trends. In the case of news for example, users can be included at every stage in the process of news making and consumption, both as citizen journalists that disseminate news via traditional and social media, and as commentators that participate in ephemeral networked audiences around particular articles.
For users interested in understanding trends, the notion of topic is of importance, as there will be many different content objects related to a particular event or idea. For example, a topic may be represented as a collection of articles in a single newspaper, as a set of articles in many different papers, as hashtags on social media such as microblogging services, or as a page or set of pages on social media websites.